This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's interesting that you preceded this little tidbit with examples of four non-ICE being accused of ICE. How many people accused of being ICE actually were ICE? If you're implying that a certain false positive rate is acceptable, at least show that the behavior you're complaining about is above that rate.
The irony of you mentioning "equivocation" further down this thread, as any equivocation—to the extent that it eventually occurred—was initially enabled here when you made this comment and the false equivalence it contains. You discuss ICE and anti-ICE false positive rates as if they're different sides of the same coin, yet:
ICE false positive: ICE was wrong in incorrectly arresting someone.
ICE true positive: ICE was right in correctly arresting someone.
Anti-ICE false positive: They were wrong in harassing someone that had nothing to do with ICE.
Anti-ICE true positive: They were wrong in harassing an ICE officer off-duty or wrong in obstructing an ICE officer on-duty.
There's not a "positive" for which anti-ICE can be in the right. Furthermore, ICE is right X% of the time and wrong (1-X%) of the time, whereas anti-ICE is wrong 100% of the time.
That's simply a value judgment that doesn't get us anywhere. Being anti-ICE is only "wrong" when the activity in furtherance of that position breaks the law. You may not like the fact that people are protesting, recording their activity, or warning the community of their presence, but all of these things are both legal and constitutionally protected.
Is it really constitutionally protected to warn a felon of the presence of the police? Like let's say Alice gets a phone alert that a white murderer who killed three black kids escaped from prison. Alice sides with the murder because she's a white supremacist. Alice later sees several police cruisers on a nearby street. Worried that her favorite convict is nearby and will be returned to prison, she starts blowing a whistle and making a ruckus to help the convict escape.
That is constitutionally protected speech?
Your scenario is a bit vague so I'll dress it up for you: If Alice feels strongly about the wrongness of the murderer's conviction and subsequent incarceration and she decides to engage in a boisterous on-woman protest on a street corner during which she yells words of encouragement for the fugitive and expresses hope that he will escape justice, then yes, she would be engaging in constitutionally-protected speech. As repugnant as one may find her views, opinions about the appropriateness of criminal convictions are a fairly common subject of public protest, and the fact that the police may find them distracting doesn't exempt them from constitutional protection. And even then, this case would still be somewhat stronger than what's going on with ICE, where the protestors don't even know the identities of the people ICE are looking for, or indeed if they're even looking for anyone (Renee Good was shot while ICE was returning to headquarters). They're just generalized warnings about law enforcement presence, and are as illegal as flashing your brights to warn a fellow motorist about a speed trap.
Blowing a whistle is not necessarily constitutionally protected though, there can be reasonable restrictions on noise levels.
Regarding City of Houston v. Hill, striking down a law that is too broad does not mean that none of the activities included in the law could be constrained by law.
The behavior of these people does not seem constitutionally protected to me. They are, in a coordinated way, mobbing officers of the law in the process of enforcing the law for the purpose of helping people escape, in such a way that they are actually successful a lot of the time. https://tiktok.com/@raebaebae28/video/7596446605474057527?_r=1&_t=ZP-93BispJ7Wlb
I hope a case like this goes up to the Supreme Court so we can get a clear ruling on this.
It could potentially violate noise ordinances, yes. But the way the Minneapolis ordinance is worded makes it clear that it almost certainly doesn't violate the law there:
There are obvious evidentiary problems here in that you have to know what the ambient noise level is and whether the sound exceeds it by the specified amount, but the problems go beyond ones of evidence; the statute is worded in such a way that there is no violation without a measurement. This could be a case of bad drafting, but if you look at noise ordinances generally they seem aimed at specific problems like noise emanating from point sources or adjacent apartments. They aren't really designed for intermittent loud noise coming from outside.
At least in the present situation there's no chance of that happening. Federal law requires that any interference with law enforcement be "forcible", and Minnesota caselaw does so as well. On the state side there are some limited exceptions, but warning people of police activity is specifically exempted. I can't speak for other states, but nobody in Minneapolis is able to be prosecuted for this.
But where is the line here? A lookout for a bank robbery is presumably an accessory to the crime, even though his only role is to use his constitutionally protected speech to alert the other robbers to the police.
A lookout for a gang is presumably an accessory to a crime if they whistle out as soon as a police officer comes onto gang territory, even if they don't know which specific crime the police officer is investigating. Or is that protected speech but the lookout for bank robbery isn't? What is the deciding factor?
I'm going to loop in @zeke5213a because this response acts as one for his comments as well, as I think there's some conflation going on here. Before we get going I want to point out that the original topic of this discussion was relative base rates for certain behaviors, and someone's assertion that opposing ICE was always wrong, to which I responded that that was simply a value judgment and that from a neutral perspective opposing ICE was only wrong if those doing the opposing were breaking the law. From there the discussion seems to have morphed into whether the protestors in Minnesota are breaking any particular laws. To that point, I will concede that there are probably some protestors who are unambiguously breaking the law, and you can count those into whatever base rate discussion you want, but I get the impression that nobody really cares about that anymore and is more concerned about the prospect that the protestors in Minneapolis are, en masse, committing any crimes. And I want to make it clear right now that that makes for a more interesting discussion than whatever stemmed from the half-forgotten base rate comment I tossed off last night before dinner, and I'll be addressing that question and I could care less about base rates at this point, and I get the impression that neither of you care much about that either.
With that out of the way, there's really a two-step analysis involved in all of these questions. The first step is to ask whether the speech in question violates a particular law. The second step is that, if the answer is yes, to determine if the enforcement of that law is precluded by the First Amendment. The conflation I'm referring to comes from the specific conduct of the ICE protestors, which seems to have two components:
That being said, I tried to focus on the First Amendment question, because laws vary across jurisdictions but the Constitution is a showstopper. The general rule here is that speech is protected unless it falls into an exception, and I couldn't find any applicable exceptions. What it seems like you're bringing up is the criminal speech exception, which is an exception for speech that is integral to criminal conduct. When discussing criminal conduct, it makes sense to think of various tiers of culpability. I'll use the bank robbery example because it's the most clear-cut:
Principle: This is what most people think of, i.e., you're the one walking into the bank and pointing a gun at the teller. Pretty much everyone understands that this creates liability for robbery or whatever the relevant crime is.
Accessory: The liability here is the same as it is for the principal, and it includes anyone who was involved in the crime prior to or during its commission. In your robbery example, the lookout is aware that the crime is going on and is actively participating in it. If you're guilty at this level, you're charged with the underlying crime, in this case robbery. Though liability is the same, some people may think it isn't or shouldn't be because the defendant played a limited role in the crime.
Accessory After the Fact: This is its own thing and isn't charged as part of the underlying crime but as a stand-alone offense. This liability applies when someone who wasn't involved in the planning or commission of the crime but has knowledge of it provides one of those involved assistance in avoiding capture. If the bank robbery lookout went to his friend's house and told him what happened, and the friend let him lie low at his house for a couple days and arranged for a ride out of town, the brother could be charged as an accessory after the fact, but not with robbery. there are three reasons why this wouldn't apply to the ICE protestors. I'll say as a preliminary that this isn't actually charged very often (it's most often used as leverage to get cooperation) and my cursory Google research revealed very little. What I can tell you from experience is that I've never heard of anyone being charged with this based on a communication alone. Sometimes the communication is part of the evidence, but those are cases where substantial other assistance was also provided. I certainly haven't seen any indication that the activity would override First Amendment concerns, though it is certainly possible. The second problem with applying it to ICE protestors is that it requires that the defendant have knowledge that a crime was committed and attempt to assist a specific person accused of that crime. I can almost guarantee you that very few of the ICE protestors even know the names of the targets let alone know what crimes they may have committed, which brings me to my third point. Much has been made about deportation actions being civil and not criminal, and while this is usually irrelevant to the conversation, this is one of the times when it matters, because, even if the first two concerns weren't a problem in a specific case, you can't be an accessory after the fact to a non-crime. If it were US Marshals trying to execute a warrant for illegal entry, then it would be different, but they don't do that because then they would have to give the guy a lawyer and be subject to heightened procedural safeguards. There are simply too many complexities here to make this something worth pursuing.
Obstruction/Impeding: This is the level in which the authorities don't have to prove that an underlying crime was committed, just that the legal process was interrupted in an impermissible way. We can forget about any liability at the Federal level, because the statutes simply don't cover it. Charges relating to impeding Federal employees (the once ICE agents most often cite when trying to get protestors to back off) explicitly only include forcible actions. The Obstruction of Justice statute includes an enumerated list of specific activities, none of which the protestors are known to engage in. At the state level, the statute looks more promising, as it doesn't specifically contain any language that would preclude any of the protestors' activities, but the case law interprets the statute as only applying to physical obstruction outside of very specific circumstances that are unlikely to apply. The state courts also specifically rejected the idea that warning someone of their impending arrest was prohibited under the statute, ruling that the obstruction had to be directed at law enforcement and not third parties.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link